The day before April’s LeedsJS meetup, I decided to try not having Q&A after the talks in favour of encouraging people to come and chat to the speakers directly. There were a variety of reasons as to why I felt that this would be the best route, and it seems to have been a success!

At LeedsJS we’ve been lucky enough to have sponsors willing to offer up prizes for us to give away to our attendees. We’ve tried a couple of ways to give them away and I thought I’d write up a post to discuss them.

Modern browsers have the native selector engine document.querySelectorAll which is really useful for easily finding elements. I had assumed that it returned an Array but I’ve just found out that I was wrong and it returns a NodeList.

Chrome DevTools has a feature called blackboxing which allows you to ignore certain scripts when debugging. When a script is blackboxed, it’s hidden from the call stack pane and you don’t step into it when stepping through the code. This is really useful when debugging code that uses frameworks or libraries such as Ember, React or jQuery.

While GitHub pages supports HTTPS for sites using the github.io domain, it doesn’t support it for custom domains. I’ve had a few people ask how I’ve achieved HTTPS with a custom domain on GitHub pages, so I felt I should write a post on it.

2017 has been a good year for me with some successful projects and some personal firsts. I felt I should do a little retrospective on this stuff, partially so I can come back and look at it in the future, partially as a celebration. It’s not in any particular order.

A really useful feature that I often find myself using in Chrome DevTools is conditional breakpoints. Conditional breakponts allow you to only pause execution when a certain expression evaluates to true, meaning that you can pause it when you want it to.

My previous site hadn’t been touched since late 2014 and was running using a custom PHP system I’d written that took markdown and produced the page. This was happening every time someone hit the page so was pretty inefficient.

As my focus is no longer on PHP, I wanted to move towards something JavaScript based. I didn’t want to use a client side framework to do this, as the content is pretty static and I feel it would be needless to require JavaScript to present static content.